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apparently this is a "thing" and I believe it's based on sales, if a figure has high sales and seems determined to sell more once a wave has run it's course they re-release cases of said figure, I dunno the actual truth however, I heard this awhile back, and it seems there is some evidence with high demand out of stock figures randomly coming back for a second round, but not all of them this happens for, I remember hearing awhile back that Hasbro was going to allow retailers to order mixed cases of figures they picked specifically but this seems to have not come to actuality

truth is I really don't know, we probably need the voice of someone who works in a actual store and orders figures for stores etc

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apparently this is a "thing" and I believe it's based on sales, if a figure has high sales and seems determined to sell more once a wave has run it's course they re-release cases of said figure, I dunno the actual truth however, I heard this awhile back, and it seems there is some evidence with high demand out of stock figures randomly coming back for a second round, but not all of them this happens for, I remember hearing awhile back that Hasbro was going to allow retailers to order mixed cases of figures they picked specifically but this seems to have not come to actuality

truth is I really don't know, we probably need the voice of someone who works in a actual store and orders figures for stores etc

I actually remember reading exact same thing on marvelous news. I also remember comics Mysterio single case existing and then being cancelled, but again I never read any clear details.

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The first run usually comes only in assortments, but by the second or third run every figure can be purchased in single-figure cases. Hasbro operates almost entirely on a preorder-based made-to-order basis, so the popular figures that can sustain a lot more solo cases end up being produced in much higher quantities in the long run, even if they seem rarer for most or all of their production life.

As an example, a case of retro X-Men came with 1 Cyclops, 1 Dazzler, 1 Iceman, 1 Silver Samurai, 1 Storm, and 1 Wolverine. A solo Storm case comes with 6 Storms. Some distributors will sell figures individually to stores once they get in the single-figure cases, so I could order 2 Storms, or 14, or whatever else, but most continue to sell them only by the case, so I'd have to order them in multiples of 6 to then break up and sell individually in-store.

Regular waves normally come in cases of 8 with one or two figures double-packed. In those instances, the single-figure cases instead come packed with 8 copies. Hasbro keeps doing production runs until distributors stop ordering them (which means either that stores have stopped ordering them, or that distributors have simply stopped soliciting orders; in neither case does it necessarily mean consumer demand has dried up).

Rarely, Hasbro will bring a figure back into production that had previously been discontinued, which is what happened with Mysterio, but there's no pattern to that. It was probably just a perfect storm of fans asking for it and Far From Home being in the pipeline.

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Generally figures are sold by wave. I remember reading that Hasbro were planning to allow (online) stores the ability to order just single figures instead of re-order whole waves, but I'm not sure if that has actually been put into practice.

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Generally figures are sold by wave. I remember reading that Hasbro were planning to allow (online) stores the ability to order just single figures instead of re-order whole waves, but I'm not sure if that has actually been put into practice.

See above. Every single figure is available in cases of just that figure, just usually not right away. It has been that way for years.

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I wanna say the first vintage wave Wolverine (brown costume) was out of stock for like six months and then randomly showed up again on BBTS and I saw him in two or three retail stores within a week or so of that.